Posts Tagged ‘organic food’

I’m enjoying going to my local Farmer’s Markets to supplement what I’m growing in my garden this summer. It’s fun, social (and if one gardens, there’s nobody like another gardener to talk about the latest success and/or fiasco), and helps me feel better on so many levels. It’s heartbreakingly easy to get upset and depressed by news and politics…and delightfully energizing to compliment people on their hard work and beautiful displays of yumminess.

When I was in my twenties I helped start a small town buying cooperative for those of us “hippie-types” who lived in the Appalachia/Big Stone Gap, VA area. We wanted food the local Piggly-Wiggley wouldn’t/maybe couldn’t offer. So 4 times a year all the “back to land folks” and the “urban political folks” gathered together and tried to mix a 5 gallon tub of peanut butter so that everyone got sorta the same consistency….you can imagine how that turned out. Bags of brown rice, lots of laughter, and everything organic…and grown by family farms or manufactured by family businesses, as those were the only folks interested in the “weirdness”of organics back in the early 70ies.

When I left for the big city (Atlanta, GA) in 1977, I joined the local food co-op (Sevananda), and by early summer of 1979 was somehow its produce manager…talk about learning on the job! And what a great time to be getting up before dawn: driving the produce truck to the (genuine) Farmer’s Market, where, in the summer, one could buy 3 kinds of peaches and watermelons, corn, and lots of other fruits and veggies, so fresh the dew still sparkled on the green leaves….and though none was organic, at least it was from the farmer who grew it, or an independent agent who worked all night going from farm to farm picking up cases of delicious, ripe food.

As I learned my job, I found out a lot of people were asking for organics, and discovered that some of the hippie-type back to land folks in California were growing organic food on a scale that was, though still family farm (or cooperative farm), large enough to send me a one ton air freight container of fruits and vegetables every week. Since the Gerson Diet for cancer treatment was starting to become popular, I easily sold every morsel of that incredible food.

So that’s what I “grew up” considering organic; and sold it, purchased it, and ate it, despite the larger culture’s less than welcoming attitude…that is, until all us hippie types, in our innocence and idealism, launched what is now a juggernaut of profit so mind boggling that most of those family farms/manufactures have “sold out” to large multi-national corporations….who are hell-bent on cutting any and all corners to squeeze another ounce of profit…which means organic that isn’t really organic.

After the success of “Organic
Spies Find Lies,” the organic industry’s most diligent muckrakers,
the Organic Spies, are at it again with a new documentary, this time exposing
the connection between Horizon, Dean Foods, Land O’ Lakes and Monsanto.

So it’s time to boycott the “fakes:” Horizon Dairy (with their imaginative spin on “free-range”) and all the other companies above. It’s time we consumers paid a wee bit more attention to what we are consuming…and from whom.